Batwoman showrunner breaks down season finale, what’s to come in season 2

Caroline Dries takes us through the family drama of Batwoman’s first season finale, THAT arrival, and what to expect in season 2.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Batwoman season 1 episode 20, as well as the events that take place before that episode.

Bruce Wayne has returned to Gotham. Well, sort of.

A lot happened in the first season finale of Batwoman, including the reveal of the Arrowverse’s Bruce Wayne. Gotham’s most well-known billionaire is brought to life by Irish actor Warren Christie (NBC’s The Village, and coming off an arc on Fox’s medical drama The Resident).

The thing is, it’s not really him. It’s Tommy Elliot sporting the face of his idol and obsession, thanks to the craftsmanship of Alice. After all, who better to waltz into Wayne Enterprises and steal Kryptonite from her sister Kate?

Because, no, Kate didn’t let Luke destroy that bit of Kryptonite that Kara let her keep after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Even though Mary steered Luke toward a successful means of doing so — basically just … a giant hammer — Kate wants to talk to Kara before she makes a move.

Unfortunately, the next step of Alice’s plan came with one major casualty. Aptly titled “O, Mouse!” the season finale saw the death of Alice’s adopted brother — at the hands of Alice herself.

Hellbent on killing her sister, Alice eliminated the one last thing she saw holding her back. Devastated and virtually alone, Alice is more dangerous than ever, and thanks to her facial handiwork, she’s got a powerful new ally.

So … what now? Could there still be a light at the end of this tunnel?

We got Batwoman showrunner Caroline Dries on the phone to find out, talking through the finale along with getting some hints on what’s to come in Batwoman season 2.

Note: This interview has been edited in places for clarity.

Culturess: You’ve officially got your whole first season behind you, albeit a shortened one. What’s the overwhelming feeling right now?

Caroline Dries: I mean, because it was shortened, there was a little bit of a scramble at the end. And then, when I saw the cut and rough of [episode] 20, I was like, “Okay, phew! This feels like a finale, it’s a full episode.” So, the idea of being proud that we had gotten through a whole season successfully hadn’t really landed on me yet because there was so much chaos happening in the midst of this.

So we didn’t have the obvious finale-type things like a cast and crew wrap party and, you know, just the saying goodbyes and stuff like that. It ended in a time of turmoil for both countries, Canada and the US, where we shoot, so it was hard to be celebratory. But now, kind of taking a beat, it is like, “Phew, I’m glad that’s over, and so glad with everything we accomplished,” and it feels like a real victory.

Culturess: Before we get into the BIG reveal, let’s talk about the smaller reveal. Tell me about the decision to kill off Mouse.

Dries: Mouse is a very symbolic character, in that he represents an anchor to Alice’s humanity, and also an anchor to her past. And for her, at least in her mind, for her to be able to move on and accomplish what needs to be done, she needs to cut ties with her past and, you know, move forward.

So I consider it [as] she’s crossing into this threshold of the point of no return to the past. The killing of Mouse just underscores how deeply committed she is to killing her sister and that nothing is going to stand in her way, including the person that she loves the most.

Culturess: Alice’s whole thing with Kate, initially, was trying to get her to accept what Alice has become because of her past. And in the end, Mouse couldn’t accept the part of her that still had this tie to her original family. Where does that leave Alice, mentally and familially,  heading into season two?

Dries: It adds onto the blinders, and it’s just more to put onto her psyche that clouds what her reality is. So, I always think of Alice as just operating from pure defenses, because if she were to — like a shark, they say if a shark stops swimming, it dies. I don’t even know if that’s real or not (laughs), it just became a thing.

But for Alice, if she stops for a second, and really thinks too long and hard about Kate’s rejection of her and Kate’s betrayal of her by locking her in Arkham, I think Alice would collapse in pure agony. And so, the thing that actually gets her up out of bed in the morning is her drive for revenge.

Culturess: Does that mean we’ve officially snuffed out the good that is in Alice? We have snuffed out whatever little bit of Beth was left? 

Dries: No, it just means that we’re just piling on more of her delusion and more of the evil sides of her. She’s just going darker and darker and darker. But I think for any character, especially somebody as complicated as Alice, there’s always going to be that beating heart. It’s just buried deeper now.

Culturess: She’s such a delicious character. To have her not be around … I can’t imagine Batwoman without Alice at this point. I still have hope for the chaotic good in her.

Dries: Yeah. Good.

Culturess: One of the things Alice does in this finale is, through her crafty handiwork with faces, bring Bruce Wayne officially to the Arrowverse. Not technically Bruce Wayne, but his face — we officially have a reveal. This is a twisted way to bring him in, was there any pressure there? What was the conversation in making this happen?

Dries: There wasn’t any pressure but obviously, Bruce Wayne is a character on our show, whether or not we see him. He exists in the ether of our show. And, if you follow the Hush comic book series, you know that at one point, Tommy takes on the face of Bruce Wayne.

So we have orchestrated this villain whose special skill is swapping peoples’ faces around and peeling peoples’ faces off and conducting these surgical operations. So it made perfect sense to us, like here we have Tommy Elliot, here we have Alice, we’re in Gotham — we need to bring in Bruce Wayne.

We’re not allowed to have Batman or Bruce Wayne on our show, so that was not an easy conversation [with DC Comics], but they understood where we were going with this, and were big fans of Tommy Elliot and love the show obviously. So we said to them, what if we play it open, and instead of introducing Bruce Wayne and then surprise, it’s Tommy Elliot, we play it for the suspense, so we’re in on it as well and now its just a waiting game for when our heroes figure it out.

Culturess: And figuring it out is going to be pretty difficult because, as we’ve seen, Tommy knows ALL about Bruce.

Dries: Mhm. Everything.

Culturess: It’s an obsession with Bruce. So obviously, that’s going to make him harder to spot, yes?

Dries: Yes. Exactly. But I mean, that’s the point, Alice knows what she’s doing. And the second she realizes she needed somebody to get her that piece of Kryptonite, Tommy was the perfect candidate. If you’re against Alice, good luck, because she has everything figured out, down to a science.

Culturess: With Alice’s skill of swapping faces, you’ve said before that Batwoman, for you, is an urban horror. How do you find the line, in terms of being gory, when crafting these storylines?

Dries: We don’t want to be gratuitous with the gruesome. There were two shots in the show where every time I watched them in the cut I was like “eughhh.” It was when Kate was staple-gunning Cartwright’s wound together and when Alice was pulling the thread out of her stitches at Arkham. And both times I was like, “Oh God.” But if you think about it, in the scope of the show, where you have Alice as a child, as Beth, learning to cut human skin apart, it’s pretty tame. So I think it’s just a matter of taste and also, it’s using the macabre not just to dazzle people or to just be gross for the sake of being gross, but to make the villain scarier somehow. And also to make these things feel realistic.

Culturess: With everything Kate has been through with her family — I mean, her father was shooting to kill at the football stadium — will it lead Kate to trust Fake Bruce’s arrival a little more?

Dries: That’s the hope. When people who grew up with Bruce Wayne see him walk onto the scene, all defenses, I think, crumble because we so desperately want to be reunited with this friend. So yes, there’s an innate trust that’s automatic there, and that’s what makes him so dangerous.

Culturess: After this betrayal by her father, looking into his eyes and fully believing they were on the same team — like Alice did with Kate — does this bring Kate to see Alice’s side more and bring them closer?

Dries: The thing is, Kate has experienced a similar type of betrayal when she figured out in the pilot that her dad was never really going to let her into the Crows despite what he’d told her, and then he’s always just wanting to protect her. So we kind of wanted to mirror that, and it kind of worked out that it was the pilot that set that up and now the finale is playing that up even more, with just a different paradigm.

For them, coming into season two, [Jacob’s] relationship with the Bat is going be incredibly complicated, and I think he needs to get over his own emotional roadblocks before ever being able to fully embrace or for anyone to be willing to have Kate’s identity being revealed to him. He needs to go through his own sort of journey because he’s at a pretty bad spot with it.

Culturess: We now know that season 2 is coming in January 2021. How far along in the creation process are you?

Dries: I know loosely what’s going to happen. But when the pandemic hit there were so many unknowns, logistically, so we can’t really keep our writing staff working during this time, until we really know when we’re starting production. So we shut the writers room down in April, and so now I’m just sitting at my house, reading comics and twiddling my thumbs, and just chomping at the bit to get back to it. Once they set up a production date, then we’ll know when we can start our writers room and get moving.

Culturess: We’ve gotten a little nod toward Alice’s big bad past, and know that Julia has been working for Safiyah this season. Will we meet her in season 2?

Dries: Yes. It was important to me to key up Safiyah, because I knew that’s where we were going in season 2. It just adds to her allure and mystery that we’ve mentioned her, and that Alice is scared of her, and Julia is clearly scared s***less of her too. So now it’s just a matter of when do we meet her? And what was her and Alice’s relationship like? Why is Alice so afraid of her? We’ve established Alice as the season one big bad, and now that we’ve done that, we up the ante a bit and make a new big bad that Alice is terrified of. It opens the door to a cool new dynamic, and it will answer some of the mysteries of Alice’s past that we haven’t explored yet.

Culturess: Lastly, we know that you have a Superman & Lois crossover event happening in season 2. Will Superman meet Batman?

Dries: No. (laughs). Not right now.

The entire first season of Batwoman is available now for streaming for free on the CW app. Batwoman returns with new episodes in January 2021.